Stories

A highly nutritious baby-food made from dried llama meat and other traditional ingredients is providing a locally-produced response to rampant child malnutrition in the Bolivian Andes. Named Kallpawawa, the Quecha word for “super food,” the product has also given the area a much needed economic boost.

Halima, a 28-year-old mother from Northern Darfur, has won first prize in a contest among local women trained by WFP to make their own clean-burning cook stoves. She won by designing a stove that consumes less wood and produces less smoke than all of the others. View video

More than 17,000 families living the urban slums of Senegal no longer have to choose between food and other necessities thanks to a new cash voucher programme that provides them with money to pay for groceries. The project is also a boon to local businesses, which have fallen on hard times amid the economic downturn.

A new poster map designed by WFP and UK Met Office Hadley Centre weaves together the latest information on climate change and food insecurity to show how the two are related. The map is one of the innovations that WFP is bringing to the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun.

What happens when a college student, an MTV reality show, the private sector and the largest humanitarian organisation in the world join forces? The answer is great TV and a big step in the fight against child hunger.

A group of humanitarian agencies and NGOs has issued their largest ever appeal for support from government donors in 2011 on the back of three major emergencies in Haiti, Pakistan and the African Sahel. Over a third of the US $7.4 billion request is to fund WFP’s food aid operations around the world.

As we remember all those living with the HIV virus on World AIDS Day, millions of people with the disease are barred by hunger from leading the healthy and productive lives that they could have with treatment. Zambia-born nutritionist Mutinta Humbayi says that by breaking down those barriers, we can help stop a vicious cycle driving the epidemic.

The future is looking bright in Goro Wagilo, a farming village in eastern Ethiopa that once risked disappearing when the topsoil vanished amid rampant deforestation. But farmers like Tonkollu Letu have since reclaimed their land, turning barren hillsides into prosperous farms.

While big emergencies with millions of victims dominate newspaper headlines, every year WFP responds to dozens of other “minor” emergencies that often go overlooked. The numbers may be smaller, but the misery is the same, which is why WFP Emergency Response expert Amy Horton says there’s no such thing as a minor emergency.

Khadija, a mother of 14, recently got a new stove that burns two thirds less wood than the open fire she used before. That means much less time spent foraging for firewood, a dangerous necessity in northern Darfur which carries the risk of rape at the hands of roving militants.